Maintenance and renewal.

Many people who are familiar with the work of the National Trust don’t realise that it is a charity and has to raise funding for all that it does. Some of that comes from membership fees, some from bequests and some from admission fees to properties. But there are other ways to do it including finding sponsors who want to support the Trust’s work. So we have fund-raisers who specialise in finding and matching sponsors to projects. The fund-raiser for my area is Liz Guest and she visited for a day recently to take a look at what projects might be appealing to sponsors.

We had a drive around the area looking at potential sponsorship opportunities. We have several memorial seats in the valley that are beginning to look slightly ‘tired’ and it would be good to replace those. Initially Liz will contact the families of the original donors if possible to see if they want to support them. If for any reason they can’t, a wider audience will be given the opportunity to ‘adopt’ one.

When we were at the top of Castlehead we found a family sitting on the seat up there. We explained what we were doing and they told us that they got engaged sitting there so it was a very special seat for them. They could see that it was more than past its best but even so they wanted to have it and they offered £100 which is a fantastic contribution towards our work in the valley.

We will have several that will be offered widely for sponsorship. I’ll let you know on the blog when they become available. We just can’t do all that we do without donations and sponsorship. We recently received a donation to be used in the Surprise View area. This will go towards helping us to improve access for everyone including wheelchair users. We also intend to carefully and sensitively install another seat. We do make good use of all the donations and sponsorship we receive and are always aware of our responsibility to the many generous givers. A huge thank you to you all.

Elsewhere in the week, routine maintenance continued and I spent a day with a chainsaw cutting back branches that were overhanging a fence line on Crow Park. There’s always plenty of work like that to be done.

Daisy here: Roy always makes me stay well back when he is using a chainsaw.